It remained unclear what caused the crash, but it came against the backdrop of Cuba's struggle to improve commercial aviation on the island, which has long faced economic constraints from the US embargo.

A day before the crash, Cuban state newspapers reported that one of Cuba's new vice presidents, Salvador Valdes Mesa, met with key officials from the island's aviation sector to discuss challenges.

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Rescue teams search through the wreckage site of a Boeing 737 that plummeted into a cassava field with more than 100 passengers on board, in Havana, Cuba.Credit:AP

The report said that Roberto Pena Samper, president of the Cuban Aviation Corporation, bemoaned that the "embargo placed by successive American administrations prevents" the island "from acquiring the resources necessary to operate a larger fleet of planes and to enhance airport services."

As emergency responders rushed to the scene, footage from the crash site showed thick black smoke rising. The crushed fuselage, seemingly ripped in pieces, lay in thick vegetation as firefighters doused it with hoses. A crowd rushed in and pulled at least one person on a stretcher from the tangled remains.

State television said the flight had been headed to Holguin, on the eastern part of the island. The plane, a Boeing 737 leased by Cubana de Aviacion, a state-run Cuban airline, first went into service in 1979, according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, a UN agency, making it one of the older 737s still in commercial operation.

Rescue and search workers on the site where a Cuban airliner with more than 100 passengers on board crashed.Credit:AP

The plane crashed at 12:08pm local time just after it had departed Jose Martí International Airport, Cuba's state newspaper, Granma, reported on its website. It said the flight, DMJ 0972, carried 105 people, including at least five children. The plane also carried nine crew members, the United Nations said. Five of them were Mexican, according to Mexican officials.

Cuban state media initially said that all of the people aboard were foreigners but later reversed itself, saying most of the passengers were Cuban. The only survivors were three women, according to Granma, although the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde later reported that one them had died.

A spokesperson for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the Australian embassy in Mexico was making urgent enquiries to determine whether any Australians were affected by the crash.

Residents of a neighbourhood near the airport said that after the plane took off, it suddenly veered in an unusual direction.

The few surviving passengers of an airliner that crashed arrive at the Calixto Garcia General Hospital in Havana.Credit:ACN/AP

Rocio Yoselis Martínez Gonzalez, 21, a manicurist, was hanging laundry on a clothes line in her front yard when the plane made its odd turn. More worrisome, she said, it was low and descending, barely clearing the wooden telephone poles on her street.

As it roared overhead, Martinez saw that one of its engines was on fire. The plane then disappeared behind trees and crashed on the edge of a field, hundreds of metres from her house. The tremor from the impact and explosion was so strong that it shook the ground and knocked decorative objects off her shelves, she said.

"I was in shock," she recalled. "They show things like this in a movie, but in the end it's a movie."

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, third from left, walks away from the site where a Boeing 737 plummeted into a yuca field with more than 100 passengers on board.Credit:AP

"The news is not very hopeful," Diaz-Canel told Cuban state television.

Cubana de Aviacion has struggled to overcome a reputation for poor safety after a string of crashes left dozens of people dead in the late 1990s.

In 1997, a Cubana flight crashed off the island's south-east coast three minutes after take-off, killing about 40 people.

A year later, around 80 people were killed when a Cubana plane crashed into a field after taking off from the airport in Quito, Ecuador.

In December 1999, dozens of people, many of them Guatemalan medical students, died when a Cubana flight skidded off the runway in Guatemala City. A week after that, another Cubana flight crashed into a mountain in Venezuela, killing all 22 people aboard.

In the initial confusion over Friday's crash, there were conflicting reports over which company owned the plane leased to Cubana.

State media reports first said it belonged to Blue Panorama, an Italian company, but Damojh Airlines, a Mexican company also known as Global Air, later confirmed that it was the owner.

Damojh Airlines began operations in 1990, and has only three airplanes among its fleet, according to a statement from the Mexican Secretary of Transportation.

The statement said that as recently as November the aircraft had been inspected as part of an annual program, and that its planes had passed a safety test administered by the government agency. In addition, the airline was up to date on its permits and was authorised to lease the planes domestically and abroad, including to Cubana.

The partner of a member of the crew of a jetliner that crashed in Cuba and another friend, comfort each other in Mexico City, on Friday.Credit:AP

Cubana suspended most domestic flights in March, several news outlets reported. Radio Marti, the US government-funded website, posted a photo of a sign on the airline's door showing that all the flights had been cancelled.

A security guard told Radio Marti that there were "literally no planes," and added that the ones that remain are "in very bad condition."